ZERO
: You’ll see.
A beat.
JABULANI
: I wonder what he was after. That guy. Surely he wasn’t going to lug a crate of whisky down the street after knifing you.
ZERO
: I’ve seen stranger things.
H
ERMANUS. DAWN.
Her curtains stay drawn. The fairy lights still flicker. Seagulls morbidly orbit her yard. Sparrows flutter and peck at fag ends and other debris on the grass and veranda.
Dassies
sulk warily in a tangled milkwood.
I stare at the stub of the
pangaed
frangipani, at the fallen, yellowing flowers.
In my mind I replay the moment when the moon plucked the pale face of the professor out of shadow. His eyes seemed not to see Lotte’s moonlit breasts absurdly white against my cinnamon skin. Instead, he gazed out beyond us at the sea, his rival lover.
That luminous face floating over the harbour wall, it killed the magic. Lotte tugged on her panties and said she’d lost her head and this was crazy and she was sorry.
And then she was gone.
I run on along the path to the lagoon, staying away from the dunes to avoid being harassed by a gull. Ahead along the tideline I see a frenzy of gulls and crows hovering over some tatty flotsam. As I draw nearer, seagulls flap to the sky and crows hop away from the rags. The birds caw at me to piss off in bird lingo. Now I see a dead man tangled in the rags: the gurney hobo stranded like some sorry, shabby foetus. His eyes have been pecked out. Now it is my turn to hop away, gagging at the raw, thumb-deep holes.
The reek’s so vile I tie my shirt over my mouth. I drag him over the tidal flats to the sugary sand of the dunes. Along the way I pick up mussel shells to hide his eyes. Then I dig into the sand with my hands. Seagulls loop overhead, yelling at me. Now and then a daring crow darts in to jab his beak at a bloody, bootless foot. I fling sand at the bird.
I pan the beach for folk. Just a silhouetted fisherman far down the beach. Otherwise deserted.
I rife through sodden, frayed pockets for a sign of who he is. All I find are strands of string, bits of sea glass, cowrie shells, rubber bands, a few coins and Zero’s Bic. Amazingly it catches in the hollow of my hands. I pocket it. I shove him into the shallow hole. I lay my shirt over his haggard, scratched-up face and shift sand in and over him till he’s gone. Then I wander along the beach to pick up stones to mark the place.
I feel tacky recycling
Redemption Song
from a film I saw of another death on a beach in Thailand. Yet it feels fitting somehow. That time it was a shark. A fluke, fictive demon shark that swam out of an author’s head in a world where no man has ever been killed by a shark. I wonder, as I sing Marley’s lyrics, how this hobo died. How he ended up so far from his gurney. He puffed up the way drowned men and spiky balloonfish do, but he may have been dead before the tide tugged him out. I wonder if it was just rocks that tore at his face. And I wonder why I want to bury him as I do, under a pyramid of stones (somehow Jewish, this), rather than call the police to zip him up in a bag and put him in a cold drawer.
I feel for the Bic in my pocket. Perhaps I am, after all, my father’s son. Doing forbidden things underhand. But, in a land harrowed by crime, I have no faith in the police looking for long into the death of a random hobo.
I feel somehow dirty for just shoving the gurney hobo in a hole. I feel a hollow pang of longing for Lotte. And I feel too flat to barter. Instead I want to paint myself blue and hang a sign over my stall that reads:
SICK ARAB
. That’d do the trick. It did for Twain’s Jim at a time when being a footloose black man was a crime.
To think that was America then, so long ago, and South Africa just yesterday.
But life goes on. I hear wind-flung seagull fugues, the bell of an ice-cream vendor, the whale crier’s kelp horn. I smell smoke and kelp and dust and jasmine.
And blacks from all over Africa hang out behind the market stalls: plying their trade, whistling catcalls, laughing a dry music, jiving to a lackadaisical Lucky Dube, jingling coins in pockets, tapping out pithy texts, hiding from the sting of the sun, maybe dreaming of scratching the paint of some smug guy’s Tuareg with a bottle top.
Now Buyu’s coming towards me, whistling a tune into an empty bottle. And his jaunty step tells me he has something to report. He’s tagged by the barefoot bus boys.
– The boys, they saw men dart a dog. That dog, he was licking out the empty mussels behind Quayside Cabin. They say the dog, he fell over ... like this.
Buyu clicks his fingers.
– Then the men, they put him in a Land Rover.
– You saw this with your own eyes?
The boys nod. They sheepishly scratch sandpapery soles against shins. They find it hard to hide their smiles, sensing this info is gold dust to me.
Their chief, donning his Kangol hat, steps forward.
– That dog was one of the dogs wanting the Kentucky bones. You remember him? He had that stand-up hair on his spine.
A Rhodesian? I just remember there being a few begging curs.
– That Land Rover was a white Freelander. On the door was painted a black shark head. The mouth of the shark was like this.
He gapes his jaws wide to flash radiant teeth.
I am amazed again at street boys having such white teeth, just as I am amazed by the miracle of shanty folk wearing flawlessly white shirts amid the dust and chaos.
I recall seeing this shark-head icon in Hermanus.
– Do you know the company?
– They based in Gansbaai, tunes the Kangol boy.
– Cage-diving tours?
–
Ja.
White shark.
I have read about how they lure sharks for tourists with a bait of crushed sardines that they call
chum
. It bleeds a slick that sharks can smell a mile away.
Hunter chirps:
– But why would they dart a dog?
The Kangol boy doffs his hat to her.
– Now that is a mystery, ma’am.
He says each word tidily, as if talking to his teacher. And yet I wonder if he ever sat in a classroom.
Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of iguana eyes gazing at me all level and unblinking out of a bald head. Phoenix. He’s sitting on the veranda of the Fisherman’s Cottage in his trademark pink Lacoste, under a lean-to roof. He lifts a flask to tell me
cheers
.
– Keep an eye on things for me, I tell Buyu.
I drift over. He’s juggling his Chinese Baoding balls in his left hand.
– Hey, Phoenix. My old man send you?
– I had to pick up
perlemoen
and crayfish in Hawston. He sent this for you.
I unflap the wine box. Brimful of geckos and seahorses and other beaded things.
– Cheers.
– You surviving?
– I am. I have money for him. In my flat.
– I’ll pick it up another time. I have to head out. Got a job in Sea Point at dusk.
– Time for a drink?
– Always. I put in an order for a Windhoek for you. That cool?
– Ta. What’s in that flask? Coffee?
– A blend. Ginger and
buchu
.
Buchu
is a kind of
fynbos
. The Hottentots brewed a medicine from it. The things folk put faith in in South Africa. Zulus glug seawater as a panacea. My mother puts peppercorns along sills to scare off ants.
I do not ask if the restaurant minds him sipping his backyard brew. They’d never hassle Phoenix.
I snatch a wire shark out the box and peck at his fingers.
He smiles. Not just one of his curbed, corner smiles. It feels good to conjure a toothy smile from Phoenix. Some of that hard-core husk is an act.
– Still reading your Freud?
– Am. It goes deep. Folk doubt him now. But it’s a fact you can’t rub out. At the end of the day all man’s antics derive from lust.
So how’s running a guy down with a taxi sexual? No doubt he’d tell me this was just a human version of buck butting heads over a mate. Some such oblique logic. And yet I feel I am on too shaky a footing now to refute Freud. There’s not a note I play, hardly a thought I think that’s not tinged by my lust for Lotte.
The waiter hands me my Windhoek Lager. I have to snatch the bottle before he pours it into a glass.
– Sorry, says the waiter.
– No. I’m sorry. It’s just a quirk. I’m funny when it comes to beer.
Phoenix arcs a brow as if to say:
Not just beer.
I love to drink beer out of the bottle. It has lingered in the bottle, travelled in the bottle, and it smokes its long-capped soul from the bottle when you flip off the lid. It feels crass to decant it into a random glass with hints of soap scent and cloth lint. It can tip my mood if I don’t catch a waiter in time.
The waiter smiles forgiving teeth at me. Then he turns to serve a guy whose crow is pecking peanuts from his hand. The waiter’s unfazed by the bird. I wonder what kind of animal you’d have to have in tow to spook folk. A crocodile, maybe?
– What kind of job you got in Sea Point?
– I’d rather not tell.
– What’s Zero’s caper this time? Gambling? Whoring? Hawking pirate films?
– You do your old man an injustice. He’s not your run-of-the-mill man. And he loves you.
– He’s an asshole to my mother.
– Your mother’s been tuned into another frequency ever since ...
A hiatus. My head goes hazy.
Phoenix swigs down a glug of his brew, then darts his eyes at me.
– Perhaps he acts like an asshole to allay the pain.
I gaze out at the market.
– Sometimes I feel like killing him.
Another lull. Market stalls sway as if they are boats moored in a harbour. Canvas canopies flap in the wind. The posse of bus boys mills in front of my stall. Buyu, all peppy and pop-eyed, is reeling off a story animated by a windmilling of his hands and a hopping from foot to foot. The bus boys laugh at his antics.
– Who’s that boy?
– That’s Buyu. He’s Tanzanian. I was out riding this Vespa my old man bartered for me. I flipped him into a gully.
– Lucky.
A beat: ?
Then I cotton on.
–
Ja
. Lucky he survived. Just don’t tell my old man.
– So now you’re mollycoddling him.
– I’m not. I hired him. He earns a cut.
– Just a few days ago you sat at your desk dreaming and writing poems instead of your thesis ... and now you are hiring and spinning out the jargon.
For one who has freeloaded for years, he’s rather too cynical about my abandoned thesis. Somehow he earns his keep just by shadowing my father and shifting a few boxes to and fro.
I see my father’s Benz in the lot. The sun beats it.
– How do the crayfish handle the sun?
– Bundled in wet newspaper.
I think of their fate. A ride in a hot boot. Then they go under cold tap water. It’s the lack of salt that kills them. Just as I imagined the lack of bar jazz and arthouse movies in this town would kill me. Turns out I survive just fine, jazzless and film-free. There’s jazz in the sounds of the market. And now a film’s looping in my mind: a film of Lotte all nude and moon-pallid. It’s the thought of her falling through my fingers that kills me.
He puts down the flask and fishes something out of his pocket.
– This is from your old man. He wants you to have it. And he says to tell you there’s a guy staying in your room.
– Who?
– A Zimbabwean. He saved your old man’s life yesterday. Some mad boy wanted to stab him in Long Street.
My heart beats an iambic
da-dum, da-dum
. The market blurs.
I hear the
zen
balls clink as Phoenix loses focus. He musses up my hair with his free hand.
– Be cool. He’s unscratched. Ironic though. He seldom heads out alone nowadays.
The gift is a girl carved out of ivory. I feel ambivalent about having it. She’s beautiful but maybe an elephant was shot for it. I’ve often taken her out of his desk drawer and held her, cool in my palm. He once told me it’s walrus and that you can tell from the cracks, but somehow I doubt it. She’s taboo but too beautiful to burn the way they burn the tusks of culled elephant in this country.
I put her in my pocket. I hear the Bic head clink against the ivory. I shift her to my other pocket.
Then I draw a shark’s head on a napkin.
– You recognise this logo?
– That’s a Gansbaai crew.
– Stray dogs have been vanishing in this town. The boys in front of my stall saw men dart a dog, then load it in a Freelander bearing this logo.
– There’s strange shit going down nowadays. I’d check it out but I got another job after Sea Point. Up in Bloem.
– And not just strays. An old priest lost his deaf old dog. The dog may be dead by now. I think I’ll go out on my Vespa.
– You don’t want to piss off Gansbaai boys. That place has a long history of pirating. And don’t be fooled by their skin colour. They may be whiteys but they’ll cut you.
He pencils figures on a till slip.
– My cell. You call if you ever need a hand.
He signals for the waiter.
– Where you from?
– Me? I’m from Zimbabwe.
– Bulawayo?
– Yessir.
– What did you do before?
– I was a teacher.
I hear the Baoding balls clink, intimating that Phoenix is slightly fazed.
– I hope your country heals, he tells the waiter.
Phoenix folds up a crazy tip.
The Zimbabwean goes with a skip in his heels.
– That’s weird, Phoenix says to me. Not just a teacher calling
me
sir ... but that guy I was telling you of, the one who saved your father ...
He pockets the Baoding balls and hooks out the Benz key.
– ... he’s a teacher too. You see?
He says this as if it is the clinching evidence for his theory of the world.
I gulp down the rest of my Windhoek.
He stands and I stand too to shake his hand. It’s not just the thing my father taught me to do. Phoenix has an aura that yanks you to your feet.
I stay on his heels to the end of the market square and then hang there (where the fruit seller’s juggling his oranges) as he winds through the parked motorcars to Zero’s Benz. He winds down all the windows to let the cool sea wind blow through. He points two fingers at his eyes telling me to look, then signals out to sea. My eyes scan the sea. I see the convex hull of a whale’s spine. Her blow fades to a mist, then vanishes against the blue.